I began working on a Winter Raptor Survey Route here in Washoe County Nevada three winters ago. It has yielded some interesting observations especially considering how quickly the habitat around Reno is being developed for warehousing or new homes. After driving through the Surprise Valley last winter I was blown away by how many perched raptors I spotted along the Surprise Valley Road along the west side of the valley. I reached out to the project coordinator whom I had been working with for three years on the Washoe County Route about the possibility of surveying the Surprise Valley and Alturas areas in Northeastern California. At the time the farthest north route in California being surveyed as part of the study was in Sacramento. The project coordinator replied that she was interested in adding the routes to their inventory. On 13 and 20 December I surveyed both routes. I was blown away to have detected 99 raptors on the Surprise Valley Route of which 14 were FEHA. I promptly entered my data into the data entry portal on 21 December, proud of what I had found. On 30 December the project coordinator notified me of another group out of Cedarville that now had wanted to survey basically the same route and that duplicating the effort wouldn't be a problem for their data set. She then mentioned I would have to coordinate surveying my route with this other party going forward as to not "double up" on the effort. I reached out to the other party about my intentions surveying the route and they responded by suggesting I focus my effort on the Alturas effort and asked my for my intended dates of surveying in the Surprise Valley should I choose to continue surveying there so as not to "double up" on the effort. I replied by saying I had no intention of terminating my efforts in Surprise Valley considering what I had seen thus far. I did provide dates for my next survey. At this point I never heard anything from the other party I was told to coordinate with and I noticed they had "doubled up" on the effort submitting data 2 days prior to my survey.
My issues with how this was handled are poor communication, lack of coordination from the project coordinator and the fact that doubling up on observer effort is a waste of resources. Since it requires a fair amount of money to drive up from Reno to the area and for lodging when my wife is able to join me, it is inconsiderate of our efforts thus far for three years to have two groups surveying the same route. Nothing was mentioned when I suggested the routes at the end of November so I am assuming this resulted from the project coordinator never looking at a map of the proposed routes.
While participating in Christmas Bird Counts at the Hart Mountain and Sheldon Refuges, the count coordinator mentioned a Winter Raptor Survey Project run out of Oregon. Info on that project may be found here. The project coordinator is a wealth of wintering raptor knowledge and his project is extremely well coordinated. If you take a look at the project map below you will notice how well spaced the routes are, which is important for assessing wintering raptor populations. After some productive back and forth discussions of the possibility of extending his coverage for the study into Northern California he sent along 5 proposed routes. Three of the routes are out of the Alturas area and two are in the Surprise Valley.

My wife and I surveyed one of the Aturas routes and one of the Cedarville routes this past weekend and we were impressed at how well planned the suggested routes where. I learned that just driving straight down the valley where I had seen the most raptors in the past is ineffective at accurately estimating the raptor population in a given area. These new routes are planned out using satellite mapping software to look for appropriate raptor habitat. Since the project was begun in the winter of 2004 I am fortunate enough to be pulling on the project coordinators 18 years of experience planning routes in Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho and Montana. The data collected thus far is so relevant that The Peregrine Fund reached out to him to see if he was willing to share it with them, which of course he was.
I highly recommend the project after having volunteered on two different projects. In the end the situation created by poor communication on the first project was advantageous in the long run as I am much more interested in how this other study is run and the data it is generating. Considering so little is known about raptor populations worldwide and so little area is currently being surveyed it is actually better not to double up on efforts.